In the manufacture of pantyhose, circular knit hosiery blanks are knit to have toe ends and welt ends. The welt ends of two such blanks are subsequently slit and seamed together to form the panty portion of the pantyhose and the toe ends are seamed closed.
Prior to such seaming operations, various processing operations are performed on the circular knit blanks, and when the blanks are ready for combining to form pantyhose, they are delivered in a mass of randomly arranged hosiery blanks. It is necessary, therefore, to remove the individual hosiery blanks, one at a time, from the mass and to convey or transport these individual blanks to the seaming machines and to present the blanks to the seaming machines in the desired orientation, either welt end first or toe end first.
Until fairly recently, such handling and orientation of hosiery blanks were performed manually in what was a laborious, time-consuming and expensive process. There have been many attempts to automate the hosiery blank welt portion slitting and seaming operations as well as the toe portion seaming operations. Several manufacturers of such automated equipment have commercial machines on the market. Examples of such commercial machines are Takatori Corporation's Model GLC-320X Gusset Line Closer and Model LC-360 WPD Line Closer with Waist-band/Garterline Auto Positioner for slitting and seaming the welt portions of hosiery blanks and Model TCR-2 and Model TCR-2X for closing the toes of pantyhose.
While such commercial machines have successfully automated the panty forming and toe closing operations in the manufacture of pantyhose, the handling, orientation and delivery of the properly oriented hosiery blanks to the panty forming and toe closing machines remain a problem. Several attempts at solving these problems have been made, but none have proven to be complete solutions thereto. U.S. Pat. No. 5,040,475 discloses a hosiery blank handling system which purports to provide a fully automated system for separating individual hosiery blanks from a supply of randomly arranged hosiery blanks, orienting such blanks in a predetermined orientation and delivering the oriented blanks to a panty forming or toe closing machine. While constituting a step in the right direction, this previously proposed system has several deficiencies and disadvantages.
Examples of these deficiencies and disadvantages include a double suction or vacuum pick-up means utilized in an attempt to remove individual hosiery blanks, one at a time, from the mass of hosiery blanks. The system attempts to limit the suction pickup to a single blank, but such attempts frequently may fail and multiple blanks may be removed creating problems within the system. Further, there is no provision for returning hosiery blanks that are not properly oriented back to the starting point in this prior system which may result in an improperly oriented hosiery blank being delivered or a jam-up of the system. Still further, this prior system relies on a mechanical device for determining the orientation of a particular hosiery blank in the system and such a mechanical device is subject to many variables which can adversely affect the performance of the system. In addition, this prior system has a separate pick-up and orientation system for each panty-forming or toe-closing machine.